What is a Tweet Chat?

With 11 new accounts created every second and 175 million tweets being sent every day, twitter is becoming an increasingly important brand conversation tool for any marketer. A “Tweet Chat” is a moderated discussion on a focused topic that happens on twitter. Each chat has its own hashtag (like #champagneday12) so you can easy follow the online discussion from any computer connected to the internet.

Within Twitter itself (www.twitter.com), you can click on the relevant #hashtag and you’ll see all the recent tweets using that particular hashtag. If its a popular hashtag the stream will get full pretty quickly though. You can also use tools like tweetdeck.com to follow the conversation. (by entering the chat’s hashtag, twitter searches for and scrolls the conversation for you). You can just listen or jump right in.

Since wine has always been a social connector in real life, its no surprise that its such a popular and engaging topic on social media.The first social media wine day was #CabernetDay on Labour Day Weekend 2010, with the inaugural #ChampagneDay online global celebration following just a month later.

Tweet Chat Tips

If you’re going to participate in a tweet chat, there are some expectations or “rules of engagement”:

1. Firstly make sure you use the hashtag if you’re asking a question of the moderator (or another chatter in the stream)

2. If you’re responding to something that was said in the online conversation, then use both the person’s Twitter handle and the event hashtag wherever possible

3. Retweeting is welcomed and encouraged to invite your network into the conversation, but it’s really not cool to go off topic and to use a chat just to market your products instead of contributing to the overall conversation.